BazanPhotos | Student Photography Galleries

Photography by Ernesto Bazan

Mercy of the moment

My second teaching experience up in Maine, a beautiful place surrounded by nature but very few persons in sight. It’s hard to photograph people up there. My students had the same challenge as the previous year: finding interesting subject matter, human beings willing to open their life to them.

I urged them to face the challenge, to seek hard within the many layers of life. Some had to drive for hours to find their subjects, others looked around near Rockport.

In the morning editing sessions, I was trying to point out the many elements within each image that had concurred in making many photographs simply descriptive, a mere recording of that very moment, with nothing more to them than just that. It was hard to motivate some students to go beyond the obvious, to search for new opportunities. At times, I had to be tough on them; I had to push them to their limits. As the days progressed, some few goodl images began to surface from their contact sheets.

Some smiles began to show uo on thir faces. These earlier images gave them enough incentives to keep probing the myriad moments of daily life. At the end of the week, when we started editing and reviewing some of the best images that we had selected, one of the student, finally realizing how difficult it was to capture the essence of any given situation, simply said: "We are at the mercy of the moment".

I turned around, looked at Enee and simply smiled.

Ernesto Bazan